Gaza conflict: UN school struck in Rafah by Israeli air strike

There have been renewed clashes between Israeli military and militants in Gaza overnight as witnesses and medics say an Israeli air strike killed at least seven people and wounded about 30 others on Sunday in a UN-run school in the southern Gaza Strip

The Gaza Ministry of Health, has issued a press statement which says the Kuwati Maternity Hospital in Rafah is unable to cope with the numbers of dead and injured. It states that at least 118 people have died today in Gaza:

Missile and mortar attacks are continuing in Rafah, putting enormous pressure on the 20-bed Kuwaiti Maternity Hospital, which is overflowing with dead and injured. There are 30 bodies lying on the floor of the dental clinic, and children’s bodies stored in ice-cream, flower, and vegetable freezers as there are no morgue facilities. Other bodies have already been taken for burial in the western cemetery, the eastern cemetery being inaccessible because of Israeli shell-fire.

“We desperately need blood, we do not have enough for transfusions,” said Fatma Abu Musa, a laboratory technician at Kuwaiti Hospital. “We only have two operating theatres, one for minor surgery. They have to operate on two people at the same time on one operating table, major surgeries, with intestines on the outside, eyes on the outside. It is impossible to deal with all the wounded.”

Kuwaiti Hospital has sent many patients on to the Emirati Red Crescent Maternity Hospital nearby, which is slightly bigger but equally unequipped to deal with the types of injuries presenting.

The Ministry of Health Gaza has made numerous calls to the international community over recent weeks for assistance – calls which have largely gone unanswered.

We again implore of you that you take immediate concrete action to bring the Israeli carnage in Gaza to an end.

We demand in the name of humanity that the international community act to:

Stop Israeli war crimes immediately, and end the attacks on Gaza;

Establish safe evacuation routes for the injured to be transported from Rafah to other hospitals in Gaza for treatment; and

Ensure the prompt and safe transfer outside of Palestine for all of those patients who need it.

The Secretary-General strongly condemns the killing today of at least 10 Palestinian civilians in shelling outside of an UNRWA school in Rafah providing shelter to thousands of civilians. The attack is yet another gross violation of international humanitarian law, which clearly requires protection by both parties of Palestinian civilians, UN staff and UN premises, among other civilian facilities.

United Nations shelters must be safe zones not combat zones. The Israel Defence Forces have been repeatedly informed of the location of these sites. This attack, along with other breaches of international law, must be swiftly investigated and those responsible held accountable. It is a moral outrage and a criminal act.

The Secretary-General is profoundly dismayed over the appalling escalation of violence and loss of hundreds of Palestinian civilian lives since the breach of the humanitarian ceasefire on 1 August. The resurgence in fighting has only exacerbated the man-made humanitarian and health crisis wreaking havoc in Gaza. Restoring calm can be achieved through resumption of the ceasefire and negotiations by the parties in Cairo to address the underlying issues.

The Secretary-General repeats his demand to the parties to immediately end the fighting and return to the path of peace. This madness must stop.

The Times of Israel, which had to apologise after publishing a blog considering if genocide was permissible, is reporting that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin called the parents of soldier Hadar Goldin ahead of his funeral. It reports:

Netanyahu calls Simcha and Leah Goldin, the parents of slain Givati Brigade officer Hadar Goldin — who was initially thought kidnapped Friday morning — telling them that he was a “great hero.”

“I know that you’re going through horrible agony, the feeling that a part of you was taken away and that you’re no longer complete,” Netanyahu tells the bereaved parents. “These are feelings impossible to calm in an instant. I hope that you will take comfort in the fact that in his death he sustained the people of Israel in their struggle for independence.”

At least seven people have been killed and dozens more wounded after a projectile struck a street outside a school in the city of Rafah, in the south of Gaza.

The school was sheltering more than 3,000 people displaced by fighting in the area. It has been the scene of heavy bombardment by the Israeli military and fierce clashes following the suspected capture by Hamas fighters of an Israeli soldier, later declared killed in action.

Jason describes the scene at the Rafah Preparatory A Boys school

Amid scenes of chaos, wounded from the school were taken to the two small hospital facilities still open in Rafah. With no mortuary facilities available, families collected the bodies of the dead almost immediately. In the corridors of the Kuwaiti hospital, stunned casualties lay on beds or slumped in chairs.

Mohammed Abu Adwan, 15, described how he and his friend, Moaz Abu Rus had been sitting outside the school gates.

“It was just like normal. Some of the kids were buying sweets and that sort of thing. Suddenly there was an explosion. I was hit by shrapnel and they brought me here,” he said. His friend, also 15, was killed.

Fatih Firdbari, 30, was outside the school when the explosion occurred.

“I was just talking to my friend and leaning against his tuk-tuk [motorised rickshaw]. There was a big bang. I felt nothing at first and then I fell down. I looked around and saw people lying on the ground. I was wounded in the calf,” Firdbari, a farmer who had fled his lands close to the border crossing with Egypt, said.

Israel’s army announced on Sunday it had begun withdrawing some troops from Gaza.

“We are removing some (forces),” Lieut Col Peter Lerner told AFP that troops were “extremely close” to completing a mission to destroy a network of attack tunnels.

“We are redeploying within the Gaza Strip, taking out other positions, and relieving other forces from within, so it won’t be the same type of ground operation,” he said.

“But indeed we will continue to operate … (and) have a rapid reaction force on the ground that can engage Hamas if required.”

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has claimed that Hamas and other groups launch rockets from close to schools.

“Yesterday Palestinian terrorists fired 11 mortars from the vicinity of an UNRWA school in Zeitoun, Gaza,” the IDF said on Twitter about four hours after the strike on the school in Rafah.

The UN has said it has found caches of rockets at schools in Gaza and has criticised those who had put them there for placing civilians at risk.

“We will take as much time as necessary, and will exert as much force as needed,” he said late on Saturday, saying troops would complete their mission to destroy the tunnels after which the next security objectives would be decided.

Netanyahu’s remarks came after the army gave a first indication it was ending operations in parts of Gaza, informing residents of Beit Lahiya and Al-Atatra in the north that it was safe to return home.

Witnesses in the north confirmed seeing troops leaving the area as others were seen pulling out of villages east of Khan Yunis in the south as commentators suggested it was the start of a unilateral withdrawal.

Local people reported limited shelling overnight in the northern areas though most were reluctant to return to their homes following the breakdown of previous ceasefires.

The IDF has dropped leaflets in parts of Gaza telling local residents to “tell your hidden leaders the battle is over” and that “all members and leaders of Hamas and other terrorist movements are unsafe”.

Israel‘s actions have been disproportionate and risk unnecessary loss of civilian life, said David Cameron and William Hague – not this week but almost exactly eight years ago.

The occasion was Israel’s ground invasion of southern Lebanon, which resulted in more than 1,000 deaths. It appears that the Conservative leadership is once bitten, twice shy, following the backlash caused by those comments. “Not merely unhelpful but downright dangerous,” was the verdict of the Tory donor Sir Stanley Kalms at the time.

It is a different conflict, but the dilemma remains over whether it is politically possible to criticise Israel’s military actions without alienating those MPs, donors and voters whose backing for the country is unqualified.

The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has taken the risk by condemning the incursion into Gaza as wrong and highlighting Cameron’s “silence on the killing of hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians”. The Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, has matched Labour’s position by branding Israel’s actions disproportionate and gone a step further by calling for direct talks with Hamas.

Even the US has said Israel’s recent attack on a UN school was “totally unacceptable” and “totally indefensible”, urging “our allies to do more to live up to the high standards they have set themselves”.

Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, has said the situation in Gaza is “simply intolerable”, but there has been no directly critical comment about Israel from any Conservative government minister. As for Cameron, he has so far limited himself to calling for an immediate ceasefire, while taking care to blame Hamas for sparking the crisis.

Here is a video showing the aftermath of the Israeli air strike on a UN-run school in Rafah, southern Gaza.

Sorry, your browser is unable to play this video.

Palestinians run to help the wounded. Witnesses say a missile hit the gates of the UN-run school in Rafah, southern Gaza, killing ten and wounding at least 30 others. Hundreds of Palestinians had been taking shelter in the compound as the Israeli military has been battling militants in the area over the past few days

The entrance is a deep vertical shaft, usually hidden in a house. It drops down a dozen metres or so before reaching a horizontal passage, lined with concrete and electric cables. Most are around a metre wide and perhaps 2.5m high, barely enough to accommodate a man carrying a heavy load of weaponry.

The tunnels descend deeper, reaching up to 30m below the surface. Most are between one and three kilometres long and have many entrances and branches. They interconnect with other passages and with bunkers used as command centres and weapons stores and to keep Hamas‘s political and military leaders safe from the pounding by Israeli forces above ground.

This is “lower Gaza” and Israel‘s casus belli: a secret labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers, painstakingly built by Hamas over recent years at enormous cost.

As Israeli forces race to find and destroy as many cross-border tunnels as possible, Hamas and other militant groups are using their underground strategic weapon to launch attacks against troops, both within Gaza and across the border in Israel.

just back from rafah. at least 7 dead,many injured in blast at school gates, mainly kids buying sweets/ biscuits. #Gaza

I’ve been speaking to my colleague Jason Burke who has been at the hospital in Rafah where victims of an air strike this morning are receiving treatment. Jason says:

I’ve been at the larger of two medical facilities in Rafah which are still open. One of the biggest was shut after sustained shelling in Friday.

I saw the bodies of seven individuals, victims of an air strike on a UN-run school in Rafah this morning. It is difficult to judge the ages, and we do not yet have that information, but at least three were children or young teenagers. The dead include young boys who were selling sweets and biscuits. I understand that one of the school’s caretakers was also killed, although that is not confirmed.

The death from this morning’s air strike is thought to be 10, or even 12 people, with about 20-30 injured. Witnesses described a normal scene at the school gates before a missile struck at 10.30.

Here at the hospital there are beds outside in the parking area to give extra capacity. There are no, or very restricted, morgue facilities currently in Rafah. I saw a young boys corpse being taken out of the hospital in a shroud by his family. They will now bury him immediately as is the custom, but it is also necessary because there is no means of refrigerating the body. In the hospital there are a number of corpses on the floor in an unrefrigerated room.

Victims with shrapnel wounds, many of them young boys and teens, can be seen in the corridors. Many of them are internally displaced, who sought shelter in the UN school after they had to escape their homes.

As operation Protective Edge moves to the next stage, we are redeploying to enable combat against Hamas & continued defense from tunnels.

Questions are being asked how long Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu can continue the operation in Gaza, after senior members of the military have said the stated aim of destroying Hamas tunnels into Israel is complete, or nearing completion.

The BBC has a video of Netanyahu stating last night that the operation would continue “according to Israel’s security needs”. The BBC story:

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has said the operation in Gaza will continue according to Israel’s security needs, even after Hamas tunnels are destroyed.

Mr Netanyahu said the militant group would pay an “intolerable price” for attacks on Israel.

His words came as hopes faded for talks on a truce going ahead in Egypt.

Some 1,670 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 65 Israelis, all but two soldiers, have died since the conflict began more than three weeks ago.

[...]

[S]peaking at a televised news conference, Mr Netanyahu said that this would not be the end of the Gaza campaign.

“After completing the anti-tunnel operation, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will act and continue to act, in accordance with our security needs and only according to our defence needs, until we achieve our objective of restoring security to you, Israel’s citizens,” he said.

He said Israel would not accept continued attacks on its citizens from Gaza.

“Hamas again mistakenly believes that the people of Israel do not have the will and determination to fight them and Hamas again will learn the hard way that Israel will do whatever it must do to protect its people,” he said.

However, in an apparent response to Mr Netanyahu, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said the Islamist movement would “continue our resistance until we achieve our goals”, reports said.

The government is right not to condemn Israel‘s incursion into Gaza because an “ultra-critical” stance against either side could jeopardise the UK’s role in encouraging a ceasefire, a Conservative cabinet minister has said.

So far, the UK government’s official position is that there should be an immediate ceasefire in the conflict that has killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis. This weekend, Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, said the situation in Gaza was “simply intolerable and must be addressed” but he has not joined the US in saying Israel’s killing of civilians has gone too far.

From the government side, only Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister, has condemned Israel’s shelling of Gaza as disproportionate, while Miliband has said the incursion was wrong.

Speaking on Sky News, Grayling defended Britain’s official stance, saying the government has to be “enormously careful to try and work in a way that encourages a ceasefire, encourages an end to the action on both sides”.

“I don’t think it helps if we make strong comments that are going to put us in less of a position to do that,” he said.

“We all want to see an end to this conflict, we want to see a proper ceasefire. We want to see an end to military action on both sides. And we want to see long-term peace in the region. The best approach that the British government can take, in my view, is to try and work to get both sides to take that approach and not to get involved in being ultra-critical of one side or the other …

“My view is that any loss of life on either side, Israeli or Palestinian, is to be deeply regretted. And of course, therefore, the best thing that we can possibly do is to try and make sure that stops, that it doesn’t happen, that there is a lasting peace.

“I think we are better off working in a sensible way, trying to take a view that encourages both sides to lay down their weapons, to find a long-term solution to this problem. That is by far the most constructive thing that we can do as a nation. Clearly, any violence is to be deeply regretted. But what we have to do more than anything else is to make sure there’s a ceasefire and a lasting peace.”

Israel eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during doomed peace talks with the Palestinians last year, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

The article said the Israelis and at least one other secret service listened in on Kerry’s conversations as he tried to mediate, in a development that Der Spiegel said was likely to further strain ties between Israel and the United States.

Kerry regularly spoke by telephone with high-ranking officials throughout the Middle East during the negotiations that finally collapsed earlier this year.

Spiegel, which cited “several sources among secret services”, said that he used not only secure lines but also normal telephones with satellite connections which were vulnerable to tapping.

“The government in Jerusalem used this information in the negotiations on a diplomatic solution in the Middle East,” it said.

Spiegel said Kerry’s office and the Israeli government declined to comment on its report.

Kerry made reviving Middle East diplomacy a central priority at the start of his term and coaxed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas back to the negotiating table in July 2013.

But in April this year, Israel made a surprise announcement of plans for 700 new settlements and refused to free a last batch of Palestinian prisoners after earlier releases. Abbas in turn sought Palestinian membership in 15 UN conventions and the peace drive eventually broke down.

Kerry has attempted to mediate during the current Israeli military offensive in Gaza and flew to Israel last week.

But he has failed to bring about a lasting truce in the 26-day confrontation that has claimed more than 1,700 lives.

Associated Press reporters Ian Deitch and Karin Laub have been speaking to Gazans in the embattled southern town of Rafah.

In the area around the southern town of Rafah, where Goldin purportedly had gone missing, the extent of destruction became apparent after two days of intense Israeli shelling that left dozens dead and more than 450 wounded.

Entire apartment buildings were flattened. Rescue teams sprayed water on charred rubble as families searched the wreckage for any salvageable belongings.

Nearly two dozen bodies wrapped in bloodstained white cloth lay piled on the ground and on the shelves of a cold storage room in a flower farm. The farm’s owner, Ghazi Hijazi, said the Health Ministry asked him to keep the bodies.

Imad Baroud, his wife and three kids fled by foot from their home near the Gaza-Egypt border to his parents’ home in the center of Rafah to escape the shelling. He said his home was hit by artillery shells immediately after they left.

“The situation could not be described in words. The kids were yelling, they were scared, my wife was scared. I felt death was close,” Baroud said.

A special IDF committee has concluded that Lt. Hadar Goldin was killed in combat in Gaza on Friday. May his memory be a blessing.

The Israeli Defence Force has concluded that missing soldier Hadar Goldin, who was thought to have been captured by Hamas during a short-lived cease fire, was in fact killed in combat on Friday.

More from the Press Association

The Israeli military said Sunday that an Israeli soldier it previously believed had been captured by Hamas fighters in a Gaza ambush had in fact been killed in battle that day.

The soldier’s purported capture Friday had helped shatter an internationally brokered cease-fire, drawn global condemnation and triggered a military assault on the area of his disappearance in southern Gaza that left dozens of Palestinians dead and scores of homes destroyed.

The military did not explain how it reached the conclusion that Hadar Goldin, a 23-year-old infantry lieutenant, was killed in battle Friday.

Reuters are reporting that Tony Blair has flown to Cairo for negotiations, along with a delegation from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The agency reports:

A delegation of members from Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad arrived in Cairo on Sunday for indirect ceasefire talks with Israel, to be conducted through Egyptian and U.S. officials, Egyptian sources said.

Truce talks would include Hamas’ demand that Egypt ease movement across its border with blockaded Gaza. Israel said on Saturday it would not send envoys as scheduled, accusing enemy Palestinian Islamists of misleading international mediators.

A U.S./U.N-brokered ceasefire proposal broke down within hours on Friday, with Israel and Hamas trading blame. Members of the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, arrived in Cairo on Saturday.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had also flown to Cairo for negotiations, the sources said.

Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and like Israel opposes Hamas, has positioned itself as a mediator for the Gaza conflict.

Israel began its air and naval offensive against Gaza on July 8, following what it said was a surge of cross-border rocket salvoes by Hamas and other guerrillas, and it later escalated into ground incursions.

Palestinian officials say 1,675 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Gaza. Israel has confirmed that 64 soldiers have died in combat, while Palestinian shelling has also killed three civilians in Israel.

strikes continuing in and around Gaza City this morning. little change from last few days … #Gaza

My colleague Jason Burke has just called in from Rafah, from the UN-run school which he says has been hit this morning.

I’m in Rafah in the south of the Gaza strip at the Rafah Preparatory A Boys school, a UN-run shelter. People here have told me that at around 10.30 this morning there was an explosion just outside the school gates.

A group of children and some adults were buying sweets and biscuits from hawkers. Seven people were injured and are possibly dead, or seriously injured. We will get more information from the hospital shortly.

There have been considerable air strikes overnight and this morning. Just outside the school, around eight metres from the school gates there is a deep penetration in the ground, which witnesses say is new. There is blood on the floor which is currently being washed away.

There are more than 2000 people seeking refuge in this school, many of them from the east of Rafah where there has been very heavy bombing since Friday, with at least 100 people thought to have been killed in the last few days.

Jason is now on his way to the hospital, and will keep us updated on this new attack on a UN-run refugee shelter.

As fighting enters the 27th day in Gaza, medics are and witnesses are saying that another UN-run school has been hit by Israel in the southern Gaza strip. At least seven people are thought to have been killed, and at least 30 injured.